a solemn pause – the films of gregory j. markopoulos

Gregrory J. Markopoulos, born and raised in Toledo (Ohio) as the son of Greek immigrants, is considered one of the most idiosyncratic and influential figures of avant-garde and experimental film in the post-war period. After shooting his first Super 8 films at the age of just twelve, he studied at USC from 1940 under Joseph von Sternberg, among others, and observed Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock at work. From the early 1960s, he moved to New York, where he played a decisive role in founding the New American Cinema movement, not only as a filmmaker but also as a writer. At the end of the 1960s, however, he radically broke with this movement due to the burgeoning commercialization and in favor of his uncompromising artistic film work in which he aimed for unconditional independence. In 1967, together with his partner Robert Beavers, he preferred to live in exile in Europe, mainly between Greece and Switzerland, in order to devote himself fully to the realization of his vision of filmmaking, albeit under precarious existential conditions. He withdrew all his films from the established distribution channels of the time and largely avoided screenings, which is why his works were rarely shown in public until his death in 1992. His early films are characterized by an eclectic and idiosyncratic exploration of ancient and modern materials from a wide range of arts and a complex, avant-garde, symbolically charged formal language of color, rhythm and sound. A thematic continuity of many of these films is an imposing, equally conflictual and creative, homoerotic sexuality, which becomes a source for art making. From the late 1960s onwards, Markopoulos developed the idea of "film as film" based on the single frame, which was to concentrate radically on the essential parameters of the medium. This concept takes shape in ENIAIOS, a work lasting over 80 hours and unprecedented in film history, which combines material from earlier works (whose source material he destroyed in the course of editing) and newly shot films. At the same time, Markopoulos developed the idea of Temenos, an archive and screening site that would enable people to encounter his work. After the filmmaker's death, Robert Beavers continued this idea and founded a self-managed archive in Switzerland. The vision of a dedicated venue was taken up in a small Greek village in Arcadia, where Beavers and Markopoulos had already presented their own works in the open air at regular intervals in the 1980s: Since 2004, individual cycles of ENIAIOS have been shown here every four years, the simultaneous restoration and completion of which (Markopoulos only left behind a fragile working copy of the film) Robert Beavers is still responsible for with great effort and dedication together with filmmaker friends.

Our four-program retrospective, which was put together in collaboration with Robert Beavers and Francisco Algarín Navarro, provides insights into a body of work that has not been shown in Germany for a long time. With Genius and Moment, which will be shown in their ENIAIOS versions, we are also pleased to be able to provide a rare insight into Markopoulos' late work far from the Arcadian field. We would especially like to thank Robert Beavers and the Temenos Archive, which provided the copies, as well as Francisco Algarín Navarro for the productive cooperation.

fri 06/09 14:00 | a solemn pause – the films of gregory j. markopoulos pt. 1: early works / twice a man (screening at pupille)

This first program brings together a selection of early films that on the one hand mark Markopoulos' transition from his home in Toledo and place of study California to New York, and on the other hand, each in its own way, express the unconscious urge of (homoerotic) desire in conflict with violent, repressive ideas of gender and sexuality. Flowers of Asphalt, which contains footage from Markopoulos' destroyed earlier film Jackdaw and from Christmas U.S.A. and features his siblings and parents, is centered around an allegorical approach to (his) coming out. In contrast, the film Eldora, shot on 8mm two years later, focuses on a female teenager who meets a boy in the desolate wasteland of Ohio. Dreamlike, with “hesitant and agonizingly slow movement” (Markopoulos), an ambivalent, swampy, cloudy love encounter is loosely hinted at. Swain, in which Markopoulos takes the lead role, is an exploration of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe, in particular the figure of the self-sufficient and independent stranger, a “gentle evocation, conveyed through images and visual symbols, of a subconscious rejection of socially expected masculine stereotypes. This rejection takes the form of an escape – a fantastic escape from what is visually perceived as crude, repulsive sexuality, into the pure clarity of artistic creation, nature and the untouched individual personality” (Donald Weinstein). Finally, Twice a Man from 1963 is in many ways a turning point in Markopoulos' filmmaking. Shot in New York, it is a loose adaptation of the Hippolytus legend and already hints at his later vision of film as film through the condensed concentration on flashes of individual frames, which Markopoulos also calls “film phrases” or “thought images” and associates with Joyce's literary method of the stream of consciousness.

Many thanks to Robert Beavers and the Temenos Verein. Prints are provided by the Temenos Archive.

Flowers of Asphalt

D: Gregory Markopoulos, 16mm, b&w, silent, 7 min, 1951

Eldora

D: Gregory Markopoulos, 16mm, color, silent, 11 min, 1953

Swain

D: Gregory Markopoulos, 16mm, color, sound, 24 min, 1950

Twice A Man

D: Gregory Markopoulos, 16mm, color, sound, 49 min, 1963

Gregory Markopoulos - Swain (1950)
Gregory Markopoulos - Swain (1950)
Gregory Markopoulos - Twice A Man (1963)
Gregory Markopoulos - Twice A Man (1963)
Gregory Markopoulos - Twice A Man (1963)
Gregory Markopoulos - Twice A Man (1963)

fri 06/09 20:30 | a solemn pause – the films of gregory j. markopoulos pt. 2: late 1960s / himself as herself (screening at dff)

The film as a mimesis of the human mind. The torrent of single or multiple frames is made analogous to the thoughts and feelings of the character when Markopoulos departs from a myth or novel, or to those of the filmmaker when he portrays people or places. Himself as Herself condenses Balzac’s Séraphîta in a single body, Seraphita/Seraphitus, female/male, a hermaphrodite whose dual condition is resolved in their angelic and ecstatic ascension to Swedenborgian heaven. In the film, it is a journey from the unconscious to consciousness and from science to religion. The Norwegian fjords are transformed into thirteen scenes/locations—mansions and gardens of Boston, the city as mental objectification. Markopoulos combines trance with mythopoeia in this story of erotic-identitary self-denial and introspective assimilation. He contrasts bodily immobility with the alternation of costumes (black tuxedo or blue sari) and the colorful transforming sensuality of the hieroglyphic-objects (a fan, a ring, a letter, a hairpin, embalmed birds and a live parrot). Facing the gestural ambiguity (an invisible embrace, an open heart, unknown hands and lips that caress and kiss during sleep) our psychophysiological understanding of the intermittency of the montage softens recollections, intertwinings and anticipations typical of a dual consciousness full of intrusive thoughts and obsessive contradictions. The chromatic orchestration also converges in Bliss (blue-white and brown) and Ming Green (red-orange and fir green) with the syncopated meter. Edited in camera, time crystallizes in the fades and superimpositions around the doorsteps, chiaroscuros and frescoes of the church of Saint John the Baptist in Hydra (Bliss) and the filmmaker’s apartment in Greenwich Village, converted with each beat-pulse into a memento, a rêverie, an interior garden (Ming Green). The objects (curtains, bookcase, chair, flower, family photos) reverberate as they do in the simultaneous montage of Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill, a mosaic portrait of the dancer, poet and painter through canvas, photos, magazines and ballet programs, a kaleidoscopically re-composed life.

( Francisco Algarín Navarro )


Many thanks to Robert Beavers and Temenos Verein. The prints are provided by Temenos Archive.

Through A Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill

D: Gregory Markopoulos, 16mm, farbe, sound, 15 min, 1967

Bliss

D: Gregory Markopoulos, 16mm, color, sound, 6 min, 1967

Ming Green

D: Gregory Markopoulos, 16mm, color, sound, 7 min, 1966

Himself As Herself

D: Gregory Markopoulos, 16mm, color, sound, 60 min, 1967

Gregory Markopoulos - 'Through A Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill' (1967)
Gregory Markopoulos - 'Through A Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill' (1967)
Gregory Markopoulos -  Bliss (1967)
Gregory Markopoulos - Bliss (1967)
Gregory Markopoulos - Ming Green (1966)
Gregory Markopoulos - Ming Green (1966)

sat 07/09 11:00 | a solemn pause – the films of gregory j. markopoulos pt. 3: galaxie (screening at dff)

A particle of Time contains trillions of imprisoned images, Markopoulos wrote. The 33 portraits of writers, painters and filmmakers that compose Galaxie comprise the evocation of the past and the conjuration of a potential future. Reaching the end of each three-minute reel, the filmmaker closes the shutter, rewinds and begins a new composition, exposing some of his portrait reels up to ten times with fades, fragments of black and superimpositions of single or multiple frames. With each chisel strike, the cut on the stone reveals a new temporary layer in the combination of frontal, profile or oblique views. Singularizing the physical or personal attributes in his studies of heads, shoulders, and hands, Markopoulos moves from the group portrait of the intellectual community of Greenwich Village to the kaleidoscopic sculpture and artistic reality of the subject. Edited in the order of its shooting, the progressive photographic complexity of the portraits increases during the screening. The required static limitation of postures, expressions and facial microgestures (eyes, nose, ear, lip), as well as the viewer's participation in the camera's fixation, contrast with the serious, silent, stony faces, which with each new exposition grow like pulp and sometimes even metamorphose into a hexomat. The choice of décors (lamps and desks, Indian tapestries or zebra rugs), as well as the selection of the personal object that the honoree incorporates usually in the last shoot layer (photos, letters, paintings, toys, masks, crucifixes, rings) are naturally attributable to the portrayed subjects. In the last instants of each three-minute roll, we hear the metallic knocks of a Hindu bell, increasing with each new portrait until reaching the thirtieth. Announcing their agonizing disappearances, all of them are fulminated in a definitive blackout.

( Francisco Algarín Navarro )


Introduced by Francisco Algarín Navarro. Many thanks to Robert Beavers and the Temenos Verein. The prints are provided by the Temenos Archive.

Galaxie

D: Gregory Markopoulos, 16mm, color, sound, 83 min, 1966

Gregory Markopoulos - Galaxie (1966)
Gregory Markopoulos - Galaxie (1966)
Gregory Markopoulos - Galaxie (1966)
Gregory Markopoulos - Galaxie (1966)
Gregory Markopoulos - Galaxie (1966)
Gregory Markopoulos - Galaxie (1966)

sun 08/09 12:00 | a solemn pause – the films of gregory j. markopoulos pt. 4: eniaios (screening at dff)

Between 1986 and 1990, Markopoulos re/edited around 80 of his films into a serial-film of 22 cycles of approximately 80 hours. Reshaping almost all of his oeuvre, ENIAIOS, an Asclepian and Wagnerian work, was conceived to be seen on pilgrimage to Temenos (Arcadia). Over three consecutive days in 1970, he filmed three autonomous portraits, abandoning his use of superimpositions and mixing natural and artificial light: the painter and photographer David Hockney in his studio in London; the writer, collector and main promoter of cubism Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in his office in Paris, and the painter and writer Leonor Fini in her house in Paris. As the myth relocates itself in the interactions of the editing, he discovered that his film was effortlessly inspired by the legend of Faust: figures and surroundings became characters, moments became scenes, and the slightest gestures became revelations. Markopoulos kept fragments of Genius (which he never printed as a film) in Eniaios, disappearing the fade-ins and outs, positive or negative elements depending on the location and rhythm, replaced by phrases of black or clear leader. Also, in the Order III of ENIAIOS, Shapes of the Mouth, close-ups of the faces, hands, or feet from the always elegantly dressed painters and collagists Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore bring the characteristic Markopoulos photographic portrait immobility to its maximum power in the encounter of the fascinating living sculptures of Gilbert and George with the long intervals of black leader from Eniaios. The frequent single frames, distilled matrix of micro-instants and gestural transiences on the threshold of the visible, stripped of the illusion of movement, remain scattered like a handful of seeds, towards or against the other frames or the black leader. All the different harmonic units of this imaginative music contrast in the cumulative metric-rhythmic principles of montage between persistence and interruption, frequency acceleration and variational imagistic slowness. In the intervals lies the afterimage as determined by the intensity of color, as well as the quasi-hallucinated anticipation and remembrance, between telekinetic vision and eidetic memory—connections-figurations-illusions of new strokes-lines of movement—resurrection of the members of the portrayed.

( Francisco Algarín Navarro )


Introduced by Francisco Algarín Navarro. Many thanks to Robert Beavers and the Temenos Verein. The prints are provided by the Temenos Archive.

Gilbert and George (ENIAIOS III)

D: Gregory J. Markopoulos, 16mm color, silent, 8 min, 1970-2008

Genius (ENIAIOS III)

D: Gregory Markopoulos, 16mm, color, silent, 60 min, 1970-2008

Gregory Markopoulos - Genius (ENIAIOS III - Reel 2,3,4, 1970-2008)
Gregory Markopoulos - Genius (ENIAIOS III - Reel 2,3,4, 1970-2008)
Gregory Markopoulos - Genius (ENIAIOS III - Reel 2,3,4, 1970-2008)
Gregory Markopoulos - Genius (ENIAIOS III - Reel 2,3,4, 1970-2008)